Love without Boundaries with Bukola Ayinde: See My Child & You Behold My Faith

My friend told me the touching story of a special needs mum. Renovation and expansion work was being done at the church that this special needs mum attended and she decided to make a suggestion. She walked up to the leader in charge of the reconstruction and respectfully asked that a ramp (a sloping surface joining two different levels, usually at the entrance of a building) should be made at one of the entrances to the church hall to make it accessible for people using wheelchairs. The special needs mum had a son who was using a wheelchair. The person she spoke to looked at her and asked if that was supposed to be the most pressing thing on her mind. The leader advised her to go and pray for more faith to believe that her son will be healed.

A friend of mine who has a disability told me that the elders of her church had a meeting with her and admonished her to work on her faith level so she could get her complete healing.

Faith is the assurance that what we hope for will happen and the certainty that what we cannot see exists.

Do not judge me faithless because of the presence of a challenge in my life or my child’s life. God has not made you a judge as to who has faith and who doesn’t. The fact that Mrs. A prayed and fasted and God healed her son and Mrs. B prayed and fasted and her son’s condition did not change doesn’t mean that God loves Mrs. A more than Mrs. B. It doesn’t also mean that Mrs. B doesn’t have faith. The prerogative is still in the hands of God. He is ‘Kabi-o-kosi’ (no one can question him). Maybe it is because he knows the end from the beginning; he sees the bigger picture. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that healing is the bread of the children and I will continue to pray with other mums who have children with special needs.

Have you ever considered that if God could use Moses to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt without first healing his stammering tongue, then God can use anybody, even someone with a disability?   A lot of men and women living with disabilities have done outstanding feats for God and humanity. Yet we ‘perfect people’ are so blinded by what these people living with disabilities do not have that we cannot see the numerous gifts that God has placed in their lives.

Is it not true that most of us have one challenge or the other in our lives? But because these challenges are not visible to others, we claim a superiority of faith to another whose challenge is more visible. Remove the log from your eyes, then maybe you will be able to see the speck in mine; for with the same weight you use to judge others, you will be judged.

My husband once gave this analogy: If you prayed to God for your dream job, what would you do in the interim before you got it? Won’t you keep working at whatever job your hand finds to do while you are waiting for the big job?

Can’t the same analogy apply to my child? While I am stretching my faith, sowing seeds and believing in God for her healing, can I at least use my baby faith to care for her? Can I love her passionately without any excuse or hindrance? Can I teach her in the way of the Lord while believing she will be completely healed? Should I be judged as faithless while doing this?

It takes faith to keep taking your child for therapy week after week, month after month and you can hardly see any significant improvement, yet you believe that down the road, something positive will happen. It takes faith to teach a child whom the doctors said cannot learn, how to read and write.

Having a child with a disability has taught me a lot about faith.

When next you see my Nimmy, my special needs child, my sunshine, take note that you behold my faith!

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